The present application relates to semiconductor fabrication, and more particularly to monolithic integration of light sources, photodetectors, optical filters and microfluidic channels for fluorescence on-chip sensors.
Fluorescence sensing has been widely used in biosensing and medical diagnosis. However, since these applications typically require bulky lenses and cameras, the resulting sensing systems are bulky, and thus are not suitable for use in portable detection devices. There have been efforts to miniaturize the biosensing and medical diagnosis systems for portable, point-of-care, or even wearable applications. However, the fabrication of fluorescence-based sensing systems is challenging since such sensing systems require various optical components including light sources, photodetectors and optical filters, etc., and all of which are made of different materials and by different processes. Therefore, there remains a need to develop methods for monolithic integration of these optical components on a single chip for sensing applications.